1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to processing apparatuses and processing methods for processing print jobs.
2. Description of the Related Art
With image forming apparatuses that print on a printing medium, such as a continuous sheet (e.g., rolled sheet), the throughput can be increased by continuing to print on the rolled sheet until the rolled sheet runs out. When such continuous printing is carried out, print data needs to keep being supplied to the print engine. If the print data is not supplied in a timely manner, the printing is stopped, and the rolled sheet needs to be set again. Thus, the throughput decreases.
Print jobs are, for example, in files of a page description language (PDL) format, such as the portable document format (PDF) and the extensible markup language paper specification (XPS) format, and it takes time to carry out raster image processing (RIP) on such PDL format files. Therefore, a method is being employed in which a print job is subjected to image processing in advance and is then spooled. However, as the resolution of print data has been increasing in recent years, so does the size of the print data, leading to a problem in that a spooling unit of a sufficient capacity cannot be secured. It is possible to increase the capacity of a spooling unit by providing a large-capacity hard disk drive (HDD), but this solution has shortcomings in terms of an increase in cost. Addressing such problems, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-83523 proposes a method called on-the-fly printing, in which a print job that takes a long time to carry out the RIP on is subjected to the RIP in advance and is then spooled and a print job that does not take a long time to carry out the RIP on is subjected to the RIP immediately before being printed and is then printed.
However, according to the method disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-83523, whether the time it takes to rasterize a print job to bitmap data falls within a printing time is determined on a page-by-page basis for each print job, and the relationship to a preceding print job is not taken into consideration. Therefore, a print job that does not need to be spooled is also spooled, leading to a problem in that free space in a spooler is compressed.